Benjamin Sáenz opens his new short story collection, Everything Begins & Ends at the Kentucky Club, with a tale of two men who meet at a coffee shop and fall in love. One is an El Paso novelist. The other lives in Juárez but crosses the border on weekends to care for his dying uncle.

I single out this story because, for a moment, it excited me with its promise of tackling border life in all its rich complexities. The two men have been flirting, which in this case means posturing in an abrasive manner. They blather about who is the “real Mexican,” the hyphenated American or the Mexican national whose Iraqi grandfather immigrated to the country from Israel. Later, the novelist defends his obsession with Juárez by claiming that the two cities, Juárez and El Paso, are really one. It’s an outlandish assertion, as the other points out: “You think the … [expletive] border doesn’t matter?”

Once upon a time the border didn’t matter, or at least it often seemed to not matter for those who lived north of it. At worst, it was a bothersome and porous security apparatus, and Americans especially had a free pass to travel between the two cities and countries. Then Mexico became a narco killing field, and nowhere suffered more from that violence than Juárez, suddenly the most dangerous city on earth.

Meanwhile, El Paso remained one of the safest, and the free pass long enjoyed by gringos was revoked, if not literally then psychologically. Bars like the Kentucky Club, a fixture on Juárez’s main tourist drag for nine decades, could barely wrangle enough business to pay the cuotas imposed on them by local hoods. The city appeared mortally wounded.

Forgive me, then, if I am more than a little disappointed that Sáenz, who is one of the region’s more respected and prolific writers, has responded to this bloody period in borderland history with a collection of stories that are largely repetitive, entirely fleshless, and often emotionally overwrought.

The stories revolve around violent fathers and cold mothers, around narrators who are, without fail, readers, as if enjoying books were a particularly revealing character trait. The protagonist is often gay or bisexual, and typically a drug addict hovers nearby, adding the predictable bit of melodrama.

No one in the book feels especially complex, and though issues of sex and race and narco-violence are peppered throughout, Sáenz’s characters seldom seem genuinely engaged with their circumstances — and often don’t seem genuine at all.

I lived in El Paso and, briefly, Juárez in the late 1990s; I spent a lot of good (and often boozy) hours at the Kentucky Club. As a relatively staid exemplar of a district that is anything but, the bar deserves attention. As promised by the book’s title, it appears in each story, though nothing begins or ends there: Nothing much happens there at all, and you would be hard-pressed to even describe the bar after reading the collection.

In fact, with few exceptions, Sáenz’s settings remain as incorporeal as his characters, a shame since there are few places in the world where the human condition is more starkly defined — by the landscape, by the people — than this dusty plain on which sit the cities of Juárez and El Paso, and with which we can be sure Sáenz is more intimately familiar than is evidenced by this book.